"Nothing short of an aroused public can change things; nothing less than democracy is at stake." - Bill Moyers

July 3, 2007

A Cogent View of the Anti-Choice Movement

Here is a thoughtful article--by Chris Hedges in Truthdig:

The relentless drive against abortion by the Christian right—the first salvo having been fired with the 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision . . . to uphold the federal ban on the procedure known as “partial birth abortion”—has nothing to do with the protection of life. It is, rather, a cover for a wider and more pernicious assault against the ability of women to control their own bodies, the use of contraception and sexual pleasure. The movement openly conflates contraceptives with devices or substances that cause abortion. It holds up as heroes of “conscience” those pharmacists who refuse to sell contraceptives. It works to block over-the-counter sales of Plan B emergency contraceptive pills. It peddles, with hundreds of millions in tax dollars handed to the movement by the Bush administration, abstinence-only sex-ed curricula and opposes a vaccine against the HPV virus, the major cause of cervical cancer, claiming it would promote promiscuity.here is the complete text.***It is urgent that we remove religious movements from politics in our country.Aren't we learning anything from the theocratic governments we see in places like Afghanistan, et al where they blasted two statues of the Buddha out of existance, where they have tortured and killed women for not wearing officially sanctioned clothing, where they dictate the length of a man's beard, where they refuse to educate girls and allow boys to study only the Koran and how to hate the rest of the world?

There are people who would take this country into those murky waters.As a result, I am proud to participate in the Blog Against Theocracy.